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Friday, November 18, 2016

Biographical Resume

When
the last recession hit, my husband and I didn’t have careers; we had jobs, and
were already living week to week. He was working sixty hours a week as a
restaurant manager. I was a part time bookkeeper, hardly the job I had in mind
when I graduated with a specialization in creative writing. I was in my mid twenties
with two toddlers and had to make this serious vision of a career – paid time off,
benefits, bonus, retirement and a salary. I sold myself on the idea that there
was a difference between dreams and careers – putting my pen in the hobby
drawer with half painted tables and half assembled jewelry. I started to look at
other career options. Google knew exactly what I needed to see. An online
school with an Accounting program. It was geared toward people like me with a non-accounting
background. Hesitant, I filled out a request for more information and almost immediately
received a call from the recruiter. She was persistent and sold me on the dream
I was looking for, especially the one where I would be able to financially
provide for my family.

Two
years later, I graduated. My husband had quit his job and was waiting tables
under the promise that I was going to provide that financial stability we were looking
for-maybe we could start living month to
month now. I never considered how much the college would cost. I was too
naive to look up how each class was paid or the balance I was accumulating. The
debt didn’t seem real. Even when I saw the balance my immaturity convinced me I
didn’t really have to pay it.There are
always options, right?My first
Accounting job wasn’t exactly the high salary I had imagined and kept us on the
week-to-week living pattern. A months into the job and I knew I wasn’t going to
ever complete the CPA certification I had been meaning to study for. The work was mind dulling, Accounts Payable.
My forty hour a week job took me about twenty hours to get through and the rest
of the time I was left to stare at beige painted walls and wonder if I had made
a huge mistake.

I
started to miss my undergraduate degree work so I started my first blog. It was
a combination of parenting and stream of conscious stories about my life that
reflected the classes that had inspired me almost ten years prior. I started
writing about clothes and fashion, partly to justify the online shopping habit
sitting in my office trying to fill an additional twenty hours of work had
given me.I became charged by the
feedback and didn’t realize my clothing outfits where inspiring self-confidence
in my readers. I was close to creating my writing voice dedicating more to this
hobby then any other one in the past.

My
job was unraveling. My boss, the only reason I was still working there, had
quit. She was tired of being a “square peg” and took another job. After she
left, I experienced my first round of micromanaging in the Accounting world. I
came to realize this was pretty common practice for someone to constantly be a
second set of eyes on my work.My salary
was low enough that I was still able to defer my loans-with no clue what that
actually meant.

In
the spring of 2012, everything changed. My blog was doing pretty well and I
began to think about another career switch, away from accounting. Then I got a
job offer to work as an Accountant for a large publicly traded Retail Company.
The salary jump was almost double and it required us to move to a larger city,
a welcome change for my family.It was a
hyper focused accounting position, which meant strict deadlines and no more
blogging. It also meant a step closer that that financial security I was
looking for. Aside from the letters on my student loans I was afraid to open,
there was mounting credit card debt and all the money in our savings would be
drained to fund the move. It was a big adjustment on all sides and for a few
years it was working. We got out of debt, bought a house and even had two more
kids. Then the cycle of regret and misery started again. That feeling that I
was doing something that I hated started to creep in during my too short
maternity leave for my fourth baby. Fiscal deadlines, micromanaging, and
working in a windowless cube farm slowly started to grate on me and we were
still living month-to-month. The little dose of financial security didn’t provide
me with the career satisfaction I desired.It was quite the opposite. Blogs are popping up everywhere and creative
non-fiction was a popular literature genre. And there I was reconciling
spreadsheets for long hours of the day missing out on the important family
years. When I wasn’t at work, I was stressed about work. They were relentless
and the micromanaging and negative feed back was relentless. Six mints ago, I
cracked. We were staying in a remote cabin on Memorial Day and I realized I
forgot to run an important report. I had a full blown panic attack and told my
husband I couldn’t do this anymore. We made a plan. One where he would work so
I could go back to doing what I loved.

There
were a lot of ways I could have continued on the career path I was paying for
but I was truly unhappy and living my life in a constant state of stress an
anxiety wasn’t helping anyone around me. I am finally able to admit that I only owe
money, not myself to the student loan. There are skills that are part of an
over all dream and I am learning to reconfigure. Budgeting and planning is an
important part of any job and with my job skills I am able to keep our finances
organized-if only for the sole reason of never having to work in an office
again.

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I am a busy mother of four who loves to write. The Pursuit is exactly that, a journey. It is failure, self discovery, humor and all the wonderful things that make me human. I can't promise perfection but I hope you will join me on this adventure.